Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Rembrandt Cyberangels Return from Israel to Cincinnati Art Museum to Herald Corona’s End

By Mel Alexenberg

Open the website of Cincinnati Art Museum and you’ll read that it’s closed:

“While our doors may be closed, we won’t let that keep us from our mission to inspire, challenge and delight you. Please check our website and social media channels for daily up-dates and additional digital offerings to bring the arts, artists of today and the creative process to you at home or wherever you may be.”

It is significant that Cincinnati Art Museum has closed its physical space but opened in virtual space. As the coronavirus pandemic has forced us to hide at home away from everyone, the world of smartphones, laptops, Zoom, and the Internet is inviting us to come out of hiding and connect to anyone.

As an artist who has pioneered in creating art in virtual space, I launched cyberangels from Israel to High Museum of Art and 30 other museums throughout the world as an homage to Rembrandt on the 350^th anniversary of his death on October 4^th.  These museums have my Rembrandt inspired artworks in their collections. My lithograph “Angel Announcing Birth of Samson to Manoah” lithograph has been in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum since 1986.

I sent cyberangel on a faxart flight around the globe via AT&T satellites in 1989 on the 320^th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death. On the morning of October 4^th, it ascended from New York, flew to Amsterdam to Jerusalem to Tokyo to Los Angeles, returning to New York on the same afternoon. When it passed through Tokyo, it was already the morning of October 5^th. Cyberangels cannot only fly around the globe, they can fly into tomorrow and back into yesterday.

My current blog Global Tribute to Rembrandt documents the cyberangels entering the Cincinnati Art Museum and each the 30 other museums with images enriched with texts on the impact of digital culture on art that I developed when I was professor at Columbia University and research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. The blog post’s title is “Cincinnati Art Museum: 6,195 miles from Jerusalem, Israel; 228 miles from JerUSAlem, Ohio; or 0 cybermiles via the Internet Cloud.”

 I am reactivating a cyberangel team led by the angel Raphael to return to Cincinnati Art Museum when it reopens to herald the grand finale of the coronavirus plague. The angel Raphael works to heal bodies, minds and spirits. “Raphael” is related to the word rophe, the divine healer in biblical Hebrew (Exodus 15: 26), and medical doctor in contemporary Hebrew.

These digitized angels dormant in museum flat files awakened to adorn the cover of my book Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media. The book’s cover is based upon my artwork in the collection of the Israel Museum that I created in Jerusalem. It shows cyberangels ascending from a NASA satellite image of the Land of Israel as they emerge from a smartphone screen. It illustrates the biblical commentary that the angels in Jacob’s dream go up from the Land of Israel and come down to earth throughout the world. “A ladder was standing on the ground, its top reaching up towards heaven as divine angels were going up and down on it.” (Genesis 28: 12) A smartphone has the power to make this vision a reality.

Through a Bible Lens offers biblical insights for the new media age. It was published shortly before the coronavirus pandemic erupted, anticipating the need for spiritual insights for coping with the radical changes in our lives in physical isolation while demonstrating how new media can connect us in virtual space. The book demonstrates to people of all faiths how biblical insights can transform life, in good times and bad, into imaginative ways of seeing spirituality in all that we do.

Distinguished professor Dr. Shaun McNiff, author of Earth Angels: Engaging the Sacred in Everyday Life, writes that Through a Bible Lens integrates wisdom about the Bible, creative thought, and cyberangels. “It is the most recent, and arguably one of art’s most complete and compelling integrations of the sacred and profane. It reads like a swift and soulful breeze. I love every ‘byte’ of it.”  Australian theologian Dr. Shimon Cowen, author of Aesthetics and the Divine, called my book “a mystical computer program for spiritual seeing.”

The cyberangels will herald the end of the COVID-19 pandemic by taking virtual flight to the Cincinnati Art Museum and 30 other museums on five continents when they reopen. They will begin their flight from the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, home of ancient Bible scrolls. People throughout the world will “Awaken and shout for joy” (Isaiah 26: 19) when the curtain comes down at the end of the plague.

The writer is author of the highly acclaimed book Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media (HarperCollins Christian Publishing) and The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press). He is former professor at Columbia University, research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and in Israel where he now lives, professor at Ariel and Bar-Ilan universities and head of Emunah College School of the Arts in Jerusalem.

Captions for attached images:

Cyberangels arrive from Israel at the café of the Cincinnati Art Museum since food and angel are spelled with the same four Hebrew letters to tell us that angels are spiritual messages arising from everyday life

 

Cyberangels go up from the Land of Israel on the cover of Dr. Alexenberg’s book Through a Bible Lens that offers biblical insights for our age of new media

Contact the author: melalexenberg@yahoo.com, +972-52-855-1223 (in Israel)

Sent to Rasputin Todd, The Enquirer, editor of Entertainment & Lifestyles, rtodd@enquirer, 5 May 2020